Kittens growing up

We don't drink beer all day. Honestly.

Speed Trials

Dvorak update: I have reached 18 wpm with only 1.1% errors. Only 22wpm to go and I'll be back where I was.

It is still painfully slow and inaccurate.

Stupid Filter

I've just tried out the Stupid Filter on my LOLcats post and to my suprise it found it

not likely to be stupid

It is my most visited post but only for the cute picture. I'd better put up some more pictures of my little monsters darlings soon.

Not blogging

I've found the solution while I'm learning to type again. The effing librarian put me on to The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator. It produced this:

Good heavens! I just had a cup of tea and realised I have not updated this since people stopped clapping and Tinkerbell died... You would not believe I spend all my time in front of a computer. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!.

I am tied up with discovering time doesn't stand still, spending my husband's money, just generally being a mother to my cats, my day is passing in a blur from dawn to early afternoon. I am not being a whinging Pom or anything. I need a nap.

I will try to remember I promised you I will write something that makes sense soon. Well, I'll try. I mean it!.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Progress report

It's now day 4 of Dvorak. I've read that you can be back up to speed in a month but that seems optimistic at the moment.

I know where all the keys are without looking and if I am willing to type at the rate of 10 words a minute I don't make too many mistakes. I can type "the" quickly and accurately every time.

Everything else is SLOW and I'm grateful for the backspace key. I confuse "n" and "t", and "v" and "w" and I often try to type as if the keyboard was QWERTY. My little finger on my right hand seems to be getting more of a workout than usual and I don't much like that.

Will I persevere? All I can say is that I'm not ready to give up yet.

Meanwhile

Dvorak

I am trying out the Dvorak keyboard layout. It's very slow because I'm not used to it yet. Expect fewer posts until I master it or get bored.

I got the idea from Holly Lisle.

Sometimes...

...it's just all too much.



Image taken from here

One little word.

I've been watching a video called God on the Brain* about temporal lobe epilepsy and the experience of God. A scientist has found that he can induce a sense of presence by stimulating people's temporal lobes with magnetic fields and he is surmising that temporal lobe stimulation is at the root of all supernatural experience. The video is in five parts and I recommend it.

What struck me though was the narration.

Controversially, Dr Persinger argues that most if not all spiritual and religious experience can be explained away by the effect of electromagnetic fields on the temporal lobes of the brain.

(Video part 4 of 5, 1:32 mins in, you can see a summary of the programme on the BBC website.)

I was intrigued by the use of the word "away" after "explain". It adds nothing to the facts of the case, which are that Dr Persinger has discovered a mechanism that causes religious experiences. It adds a whole dimension to the emotions involved though and implies that Dr Persing is dismissive of religious experience. Well, maybe he is. I found it interesting how one small everyday word can alter the impact of the narration so much.

*Thanks to Scott from Oregon's post on EE's blog. And thank you Robin for letting me know where I saw this.

Truth and fiction

If you've read or listened to my post Let Me Tell You A Story... then you might think that I had a bad experience with geese in my past. In fact, I haven't. I was going to set the record straight in the comments to that post with a simple: this has never happened to me. Then I remembered that although I'd never run in fear from a goose I had two bad experiences that I must have been drawing on for the story. I have a vague recollection of going for a walk and crossing a field of cows, only to find half-way across the field that a bull was concealed in the middle of them. I ran faster than I thought I could and got over the fence in the shortest possible time. Oddly enough, though, that wasn't the incident that came to mind first. The most terrible, phobia-creating event in my life was when I was locked in the toilet by a crane fly.

I've always been scared of spiders for as long as I can remember and I think my phobia about crane flies started long before the toilet incident but it has stuck in my mind as one of the most terrifying things that has happened to me. I must have been around 12 years old and I was in the loo. I went to unbolt the door and a bloody great flying daddy-long-legs fluttered on to the bolt. I couldn't get out without touching it and there was no way I was going to do that. I was filled with terror and revulsion at the very thought. It floated away from the bolt so I reached out to make my escape but before my fingers reached the lock it was back and I nearly touched it! My heart was racing and I could see no way out. My mind was empty of everything except fear. Every time I reached for the bolt, the insect aimed for it too and I jumped back in terror, my escape blocked. This went on for hours and hours, or more probably a minute or two, before I made my escape.

This incident is was what I was drawing on when I wrote about the geese. I'm not sure what made me choose geese as my phobia and not insects: they're all flying baddies but geese don't cause the skin on the back of my neck to squirm. And perhaps "The day I got locked in the loo" doesn't have quite the impact I was after.